Friday, January 25, 2013

An effort that was fruitless and thus exhausting - Hofmannsthal's collected fiction

In his fiction, Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a ghost. His invisibility amazes me. Arthur Schnitzler for decades obsessively rearranged the same story; each Hofmannsthal story exists is unique, which is frustrating. Repetition is easier to understand.

When I say “each Hofmannsthal story,” I mean all five of them, all published before he was 28 years old. In the last one, the “Lord Chandos Letter” (1902), which I am perhaps abusing by calling it a story, Hofmannsthal obliquely announced his renunciation of prose fiction, and poetry, too. Afterwards, he wrote essays, criticism, plays and libretti, but no poems and no stories (discounting an unfinished novel).

Thus my failure to understand the valuable service New York Review Books did by assembling The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings (2005, translations by Joel Rotenberg). I first thought the book was a bit of a ragbag. Just 128 pages, several of them blank, for such a varied and productive writer. Several of the pieces are prose poems, several are unfinished. What a mess – but I was wrong, the principle of selection was not eccentric but completist.

For the sort of reader to whom poetry is tedium and the idea of reading a play or, you gotta be kidding me, an opera libretto is laughable, the NYRB book is the way to read Hofmannsthal. Other valuable collections of Hofmannsthal’s prose exist, but they omit published stories and some good scraps. End of bibliography.

“Tale of the 672nd Night” (1895) is the earliest story. The title tells me that I am in the world of the Arabian Nights. A wealthy young Persian man cuts himself off from the affairs of the world on order to devote himself to beauty:

For a long time he was drunk on this great, profound beauty that was his, and all his days were more beautiful and less empty among these objects, which were no longer dead and insignificant, but a great legacy, the divine work of all the generations.

Yet he felt the triviality of all these things along with their beauty. The thought of death never left him for long, and it often came over him when he was among laughing and noisy people, at night, or as he ate. (16)

When I said Schnitzler, but not Hofmannsthal, was constantly rewriting one story, I was unfair. The difference is Hofmannsthal keep changing the form and style of the story.

Even his few servants begin to torment him simply by their human existence:

A terrible apprehensiveness came over him, a mortal fear of the inescapability of life. What was more terrible than their ceaseless observation of him was that they forced him to think about himself, an effort that was fruitless and thus exhausting. (20)

But soon whatever remains of his concern for his servants leads to a bizarre series of adventures (surreal and Kafkaesque would not be bad descriptors) in which his search for beauty betrays him. By the end the story is not at all like anything I remember from the Arabian Nights, but rather more like Heinrich von Kleist. Life is escapable after all.

7 comments:

There must be equivalent editions in German, the fiction cleanly separated from everything else.

I will look at another story or two tomorrow, quite different ones. He is a cold, fish-eyed kind of writer, so I would not predict that anyone will love him, but I think you would find his stories worthwhile.

The reason not to read opera librettos is that most of them are terrible. But if I followed that logic I would not read novels, either. Or anything. Still, Hofmannsthal is a special case, alongside Auden the most prestigious writer to write libretti. I think - who am I forgetting?

“Tale of the 672nd Night” reminds me of the Steiner subplot of "La Dolce Vita," but probably only because ma femme and I watched Mr F's masterpiece last night. Anyway, Hofmannsthal seems worth spending some time on. I'm currently reading some Turgenev stories from the same time period. They aren't as good as his novels, but they ain't bad, neither.

Your Austrian Lit non-challenge is going well, don't you think? I also must thank you for suggesting Eduard Mörike's Mozart novel; it was very fine.

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I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.